


Miles to go

by _RPTrash (shiplizard)



Category: Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), The Following
Genre: But in a nice consensual way, Gen, Gore, I mean it about the context, Makes no sense out of context, Murder, RP!Fic, Starbucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-03-01 00:02:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2752085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/_RPTrash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roderick woke up in a hospital seven months ago, after a fever dream about a prison ship. He's having strange dreams, and he feels like he's missing something, here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miles to go

Roderick wakes up and fumbles for his neck. He isn't gasping but he feels dizzily like he should be; this morning's entry in his dream journal is going to be headed _hemp._ A tree, this time. Not a mast. The same dark-eyed figure as the dream headed _yard-arm._

The dreams are a refuge for a life in shambles; peaceful, when he's got no peace. Sometimes he's angry (sometimes he's so damn angry) but the finality of death-- at the end of a sword, at the touch of a wood witch, on a kitchen table-- they always tie it up with a bow. And sometimes he's weeping as it ends. Sometimes he's ready. Sometimes they're good. The witch dreams are powerfully erotic, sometimes. 

Tonight was angry. 

He was so damn angry at the dark-eyed figure because even in his dream he knew that dying would mean waking up and another day of searching, furious that he was being forced back by an implacable ghost to face a life he doesn't quite feel at home in. 

He tells his dream journal: 

`It has been seven months since my discharge and I still resent waking up. `

He doesn't write about the betrayal he felt when he heard the heart monitor and climbed back up from nothing. He's already written that and it's time to press on. 

`Like the other dreams, a figure from the Prison Barge hallucination. Seems to symbolize mundanity & unvarnished truth. In the logic of the dreams I recognized him as the head of the family in Joe's place. His presence changed the nature of killing from shot to hanging. I'm not sure yet what that symbolizes.`

He records the timeline of it as dispassionately as he can, re-affirms his impressions of a stiff english accent and an authority both natural and awkward. Over the instant coffee that came with the room, he does his daily re-read, back through older entries to look for some pattern, some theme. It's still only the obvious. The dreams of dying are all tied to the one fractured fever dream he was trapped in, a prison almost too obviously symbolic of being comatose. His dream avatar of Hannibal Lecter, looking nothing like Anthony Hopkins, would sigh and agree with him that it was all too hamfisted. 

He closes the journal; drains the last cold coffee; packs; smiles at the man who checks him out.  
He looks for his family. 

It's been six and a half months since he started looking, and the trails are colder than ever. He comes as an old friend-- meets strangers who've moved into vacant houses, or relatives who greet him with a smile but no recognition and no information. He's lonely, and irritated, and resents knowing that he had a hand in his family's dissolution, that he trusted the wrong people at the wrong time. 

 

He goes to sleep, and he dreams. 

_He's come to take Joey, but Joey's nowhere to be found-- he hunts room to room and finds Joe, flanked on one side by a silent figure he knows is Joe's enforcer, in the way you know in dreams. Buzz-cut head and cold eyes, and he doesn't say a word but Roderick knows if he did it would be a slick James Bond villain accent._

_The door is gone, the way doors go in dreams, and Joe begins a nonsense litany of his sins, syllables without meaning, as the silent enforcer draws a gun._

_His teeth are bared as he shrinks back, the enforcer walking him back up against the wall and taking him by the back of the neck, almost like a caress. Joe's presence is an afterthought, now, the bulk of the enforcer, tall and strangely cool, is everything, and he realizes that he is ready and that this is right._

_The muzzle of the gun kisses his forehead, and his killer leans in to whisper into his ear. In his sweet-smooth Bond-villain voice, in a tone like a sweet nothing, like an endearment, so close that Roderick can feel his lips move-_

_"Absolution."_

He wakes up sweating, but limp. Languid, maybe, is more accurate: he lies blinking at the ceiling for a long time before he can make himself kick off the sheets.

`He is a part of the Prison Barge hallucination, but not one I can remember in detail. His face is familiar but not clear. Strong associations with death, familiar & welcome. The dream was erotic. Not a very subtle personification of desire for death.`

 

The mystery of Joe's enforcer gives him something to distract him, because there are memories at the edge of his mind. The dreams are becoming clearer, night by night, week by week-- not every night, but with regularity. The witch. The captain. The cannibal. The enforcer? They leave him wistful, even the ones with the damn captain who keeps throwing him back into the world. 

As he gathers family back together, he doesn't find the words to tell them about what's changed, and they don't ask. He begins to be at home again in his life. He still feels like something's missing. Maybe it's his house. Maybe it's his old life-- he's had to move. New town, new residence, new routines. It's reasonable to feel like something's missing. 

Whatever it is, it isn't Joe. Joe's still out there, somewhere, not as dead as he wants people to think; Roderick will leave him wherever he lies. That's over. The dreams don't stop, but they fade, and he stops writing them down. 

 

 

It's been more than a year since he woke up. They're salting the roads against the first heavy snowfall of winter, and he's come into town for groceries. The checkout girl is friendly, knows the names of people she sees less than once a month, has a smile for everyone, remembers things like a computer.

"Hey, honey. Friend of yours is looking for you." 

"Really?" Nobody's unaccounted for. He doesn't show how he's gone on alert. 

"Yeah. Been asking around." 

"Guy named Joe? Dark hair, friendly face, about this tall-?" 

"Nah," she says, which is no kind of relief.

"Hardy, maybe?" A quick description and she's shaking her head again. 

"Nah-- his name's Charles. English guy, real big?" 

"Oh, Charles," he says, feigning recognition. "Been a while. He didn't tell me he'd be in town." 

"Said he'd be in town for a few more days. Mostly hanging around the 'Bucks up the road, he said. He's on vacation." She laughs: "I didn't know we had a tourist board around here." 

"It's pretty country," he says, feeling his heart slamming inside his ribcage. 

 

He takes the groceries straight home, too short and too sharp with his people, and when one of his deputees mentions that someone was asking about him in town he nearly bites the kid's head off. His family shrinks away from him and he hates it, worries not for the first time what he could become if he goes on as if nothing changed, like he never took the bullet. 

Maybe Joe's not leaving him be after all. But a dream's not enough to chase him off. English guy. Real big. He used to dream that Joe had an enforcer. He used to dream a lot. Could be anything. Feds. Misdirected book critic. 

It paralyses him in his room; he ought to be packing if he has to make a run, but he doesn't know where he'd run to. He should be calling the friends in law enforcement he has left but he doesn't know what to say. With no end goal he can't make himself start, sits on the bed frozen until his body gives it up, fight or flight drying up and leaving just a bone-tired slump. 

He makes himself sleep. 

_The dream is sharp and clear like no dream has been in months, and he is full of alien knowledge of himself and the world he's in and the logic he has to abide by._

_The house made of carved wood and sandstone is his home, and he recognizes the kid tending the cattle as the one he shouted at last night, recognizes the cattle as cattle even though they're about the size of turkeys and they look like little dinosaurs-- recognizes the kid even with the different planes of his face and gold eyes and bone ridges cracking out of his skin._

_Just like they crack out of Roderick's skin. Like it's always been._

_He touches the young man's shoulder, soothes him, and gets a relieved smile, his house falling into order in that second._

_They come for him, then, from the monastery up the hill, like they were always going to, in grey robes that mean death, because grey is the color of a dead man's scales, of discarded eggshells, and the Foundation is death, and the Church is the Foundation, and so the Church is death. They dip their heads to him in respect, and he bows deeper, because he is faithful and he has been waiting a long time._

_They walk him up quietly, and he casts two shadows under two suns as he steps into a bare yard, scoured clean of life, featureless except an altar._

_Guidance himself is waiting-- father of the church, beholden only to the elders-- and a set of hooded monks, and the emancipator standing waiting with his blade, a foot and a half spike of metal with a cutting edge but a thick, pulverising center. It wounds by crushing, not cutting its way in, but the emancipator has honed the edges glass-sharp as a sign of his respect and the dignity of his office._

_They make him confess, and he vomits out his fears and his peevishness and his memories of Joe and Hardy and the prison barge. They make him do penance, a barbed scourge in his own hands, and he beats the softest parts of his back bloody before they take it from his numb hands and lead him to the altar._

_The emancipator draws back his hood, and he and Roderick smile softly at each other, like the best old friends. Two monks pin his wrists-- it's only a formality. Roderick's not going anywhere; he heaves a ragged sigh and leans back against the stone._

_"I absolve you," the emancipator says, in his sweet, serious voice, and drives his blade into Roderick's heart._

_The agony of his chestplates shattering open and tearing his skin as they go feels like a gunshot and the pain's in the wrong place, but he is saved._

The dream fades gently into the feeling of his blankets and the sour taste in his mouth and the sound of an alarm going off. 

He makes peace before he goes, noting the parallels with his dream-- makes it right with his deputy and tells them he'll call, that he's got to go meet someone. 

 

The Starbucks is, he's learned, five years old, but the baristas have a small town pride in not being taken in by a corporate franchise. They call out the faux-italian drinks with the inflection and sincerity you get from kindergarteners being forced to memorize _Frère Jacque._ He sits in the back, sipping burnt coffee and letting his eyes drift. He's not sure exactly what he's looking for, but he's pretty sure he'll know it when he sees it. 

"Venti chai latte with soy for Chaz," the barista shouts, sounding like she's judging the drink and the nickname at the same time. A shadow near the door stands up, and Roderick startles, because his eyes had skipped over him, a slouching, tired figure bundled up against the snow-- knit cap, hoody under a thick leather coat. It's the uniform of nobody; he could be a trucker, a drifter, a college student from down the road, but Roderick knows he's not any of the above. 

Roderick knows before the crisp -

"Mine, thank you-"

That the big man will have a slick Bond-villain accent. 

He sits up straighter as the man turns, face familiar but not familiar, and the stranger's eyes widen, because apparently they looked right over each other. Roderick's spotted now, and he sits, waiting for the shoe to drop as the stranger comes over and takes a seat without asking. 

"Tim Nelson?" 

Roderick nods. "Heard you've been looking for me." 

"I may be. It depends on which Tim Nelson you are." 

Reality feels like it's straining at the seams; it's going to crack or he will. One way or another. 

"Know many?" 

"At least two," says the stranger, as if this is a normal thing to say, as if he doesn't have a grip on the idea that there are things that aren't normal. 

He forces a nice, conversational smile; there's no-one in earshot, and it looks like he's being polite when he says- "Are you here to kill me?" 

The stranger smiles, eyes lighting up hopefully. "Do you think I am?" 

"Not sure. Yet." 

The stranger's no stranger. But accepting what he knows is going to mean cracking like glass. It's going to mean everything changing. Roderick takes a drink of coffee; the stranger drinks his chai; they eye each other. Roderick looks him over, and even knowing what he's looking for it takes a while to see that the texture of his skin is a little off, that there's no hair on his wrist, on his face, that his face isn't... right, exactly. He finds his gaze drifting to the other man's hands. There are streaks of faint, faint blue where you'd expect veins running under the skin, and the eye picks them up as just that and moves on, but Roderick is looking now, and if you actually look, they're just blue smears, faint and thin as water colors. The idea of the thing, not the thing itself. 

If he accepts what he knows, it's all going to change on him again, and he's not sure he's ready for that. 

"Chaz?" Roderick asks, finally. 

"Short for Charles," the stranger admits, sheepishly, and adds, "Pollard," as if it's something to be embarassed about. "Among other names. It is you, isn't it-? I mean, you wouldn't let a pair of colored lenses throw you, would you-?" 

"It's not the contacts that're throwing me, buddy," he murmurs. "But yeah. It's me." 

"Thank goodness." The stranger--Chaz-- Charles-- other names-- relaxes, leaning his elbows on the table, smiling at Roderick like they're best old friends. "There are a _lot_ of universes with a _lot_ of worlds in them and I was frankly pretty petrified I'd been dropped in the wrong one, because how would you know? Really? If you weren't finding someone because they weren't there or because they didn't want to be found? Let alone people who skip in and out but I actually think I have a lead on Iris. How I'm going to get enough money to _get_ across one of your ridiculously large oceans is another thing altogether; I've been living off of bar-bets and the odd scam since I was left in this swamp-- no offense, it's lovely, it's just not a climate I'm used to-" 

"Stop." Roderick holds up a hand. "Stop. Give me a second." 

"Sorry." 

Instant contrition. Roderick's missed the way he goes from potentially dangerous serial killer to puppy in a matter of seconds. The way he's actually both. It's not actually-- a change. Nothing's changing. It's just a realization that the universe is wider. That's all. 

"Nice contacts, by the way. Very convincing hazel." 

"I tried blue, first, but it went this alarming green that everyone commented on, and I didn't particularly want the attention." His friend gives him a rueful smile. "So. Thank you." 

"Had a dream about you, the other night." 

"...that may have been me, I'm afraid. I've been looking for you. But I still top out at 'moderately telepathic', so I imagine mostly I just confused us both."

"Didn't say it was a bad dream. You need to learn to apologize less." 

"S-" and his friend breaks off and gives him an arch look. 

"So. Are you here to kill me?" 

"...well. Are you here to die?" He tips his head slightly. 

Roderick thinks about all his dreams of dying, and the way they'd told each other it might be. He's been tired. He could let a heavy burden off his shoulders, now, and it'd be all right. 

Roderick thinks that if it's real-- if it's all real-- then he's got more family unaccounted for. That there's something to see. That there's part of him missing that he ought to go find. 

Roderick says: 

" _Whose woods these are I think I know._  
His house is in the village though;  
He will not see me stopping here  
To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

_My little horse must think it queer_  
To stop without a farmhouse near  
Between the woods and frozen lake  
The darkest evening of the year. 

_He gives his harness bells a shake_  
To ask if there is some mistake.  
The only other sound’s the sweep  
Of easy wind and downy flake." 

It's a poem school kids recognize but the man across from him won't. Everything's going to be new to him-- they never got around to Poe, he's got Frost to get through, he'd probably like Donne more than Roderick does. The option is on the table, freely given, and he could rest now like the narrator would rest with the snow covering him up. But there's so much to do, now. 

" _The woods are lovely, dark and deep,_  
But I have promises to keep,  
And miles to go before I sleep,  
And miles to go before I sleep." 

"Your voice is beautiful. I've missed that." 

"Eh." He tries to look grumpy about being mooned over in a smalltown Starbucks, but he can't muster much irritation. "So. Lead on Iris?" 

C'rizz takes his hand, and beams like both his native suns.


End file.
